On 10/15/16, we interviewed Jaime Camille and Margot Jane, creators of the MM sci fi/fantasy comic Kindred Skies, for our second annual Graphic Novel / Web Comic week. More info about Jaime, Margot and their work at the end.

J. Scott Coatsworth Today, we have Jaime and Margot of the comic Kindred Skies. I met these two at YaoiCon, and we’re thrilled to have them here at QSF. 🙂

J. Scott Coatsworth Welcome, guys!

J. Scott Coatsworth Want to start by telling us a little about each of you?

Margot Jane Hi, hey! Thanks for having us 🙂 We’ve been making stories together for quite a while now. I’m Margot, I do quite a few random things but for Kindred Skies, I co-write and do all of the colors/finishing on our pages.

Jaime Camille Good morning everyone! We’re both born and raised in Cali, and have known eachother since we were teens. We used to write stories online together!

Jaime Camille I currently work in animation, and to get better at drawing, we thought we’d turn one of our to stories into a webcomic. So I do all the rough layout and inking 🙂

Margot Jane In my non-comic life, I’m a photo editor and studio manager. Way less exciting!

J. Scott Coatsworth That’s great that you do it all yourselves. 🙂

J. Scott Coatsworth Want to tell us a little about the comic? What’s it about?

Jaime Camille Well, it’s a desert fantasy about a mercenary named Rofaryn and his band of brothers, as they wander the world to try and make a living. Each chapter explores a different town they enter and they adventure they have there.

Margot Jane They’re “mercenaries”…In the sense that they do random work for pay. They’re not so much warriors, though they get up to some feisty shenanigans

Margot Jane It’s really about their little found family, and finding their space in a world

J. Scott Coatsworth Is it set on Earth, or an alternate world?

Margot Jane That doesn’t really have a space for them?

Margot Jane It’s an alternate world

J. Scott Coatsworth The best sci fi/fantasy stories are strong on the human element. 🙂

Jaime Camille It’s a fantasy world, with magic and sorcery. It’s set in a desert where supposedly a goddess has cursed everyone and there is only 1 woman born for every three men

J. Scott Coatsworth LOL… Ooooh.

Margot Jane That’s what draws me to stories, characters you can enjoy following!

Margot Jane Plot… sure? But characters! (jk, jk, plot is great and all)

Jaime Camille Seconded! An interesting world is only as good as the lens of the character experiencing it

J. Scott Coatsworth So this grew out of some prose fiction you guys had written together?

Jaime Camille Yes! We’ve been writing about Rofaryn and his men for a long time now- short stories, novels, RP’s. But we ended up with SO MANY stories, it was such an episodic format, that it wasn’t working well as novels. It works almost like a tv show, it’s very visual.

Margot Jane Oh, if we had unlimited monies, man.

J. Scott Coatsworth LOL Yes

J. Scott Coatsworth Are any of those available in print/ebook form?

Margot Jane Not at this point; we’re actually starting up posting stories on our site, side stories and the like. Because of the amount of characters even just in the webcomic, we want to try and show new sides of them- and there’s just not time in the day to draw them all!

Margot Jane And we’re both writers, so it seems natural 🙂

Jaime Camille Also, we’d like to start a Patreon next year, and we’re trying to figure out rewards for that! Some of our longer stories might be available there.

Margot Jane mm rewards

J. Scott Coatsworth Yes, Patreon seems to work particularly well for graphic novels and web comics

Jaime Camille Yeah, people really get attached to visual media. It’s an immediate grab, where as with writing you have to get people to want to read it. I’d been struggling with that for a long time!

J. Scott Coatsworth So that brings me to my next question.

J. Scott Coatsworth Platform. Is your comic online for free? Online in a paid model? In eBook form? in Print?

Margot Jane It’s all online, for free~ We have a tapastic page, as well as our main site (KindredSkies.com). We’ll be doing a print edition next year

Margot Jane We’re looking to start tabling at conventions 🙂

Margot Jane But the comic will pretty much always be available, even as we look back in horror at our fledgling mistakes

J. Scott Coatsworth LOL… yeah, I do a serial story, and you can’t go back.

J. Scott Coatsworth What kind of mistakes have you made??

Margot Jane oh lord

J. Scott Coatsworth LOL

Margot Jane Well for starters, I recommend not having seven “main” characters in a visual comic

Margot Jane even if they are all your children

J. Scott Coatsworth Yes. I have ten. LOL

Jaime Camille In general, most of our mistakes came down to translating our writing into a visual format

Margot Jane We tend to be very talky! And it shows.

Margot Jane We’re actually rewriting the second half of the first chapter this weekend to make up for some of that at this point.

Jaime Camille We’d written in these elaborate crowd scenes, or things that just didn’t translate into panels very well. We ended up having to re-write things on the fly sometimes. It’s a very…organic process

Angel Martinez Have you found your drawing style changing over time for the characters? (I see that in a lot of long-running web comics)

Jaime Camille Oh my, yes! We’re still really new, this is only our first year. And I’ve already grown so much!

Jaime Camille I’m starting to notice how to make things work better, and drawing each character comes much more naturally

Jaime Camille It’s a little frustrating actually, to look back at earlier pages and see how…rough they are, but I know that’s a good thing too

J. Scott Coatsworth I noticed that with the Simpsons LOL

Jaime Camille Oh yeah, almost all cartoons go through a growing period!

Angel Martinez It’s actually something I like to watch as a web comic reader – I mean, I know it probably makes you guys cringe, but I love that growth process. 🙂

J. Scott Coatsworth Yes. 🙂

Jaime Camille That makes me so happy to hear! 😀

J. Scott Coatsworth How do you keep track of all your characters and story arcs?

Margot Jane Planning! Mindmelting amounts of planning

Margot Jane This first chapter is more focused on Rofaryn and Cin as the mains, since we didn’t want to overwhelm people?

J. Scott Coatsworth excel? character sheets? scrivener?

Margot Jane ….notecards

Margot Jane one thousand of them

Jaime Camille hahaha old school flash cards

Margot Jane and post-its!

Margot Jane love me some sticky notes

Jaime Camille and our scripts are just done in drive, so we can talk to each other when we’re apart

Margot Jane Oh yes! Google drive is king

Margot Jane Seriously, the most useful thing for writing in a team.

Jaime Camille Pssht, we ain’t getting paid for promotion

Angel Martinez omg – I love you guys. Drive is great for collaboration.

Margot Jane but i love it ;_;

Margot Jane Angel Martinez lol, really though, it is!

J. Scott Coatsworth Drive makes me crazy. LOL

Jaime Camille Really? In what way?

Margot Jane what?! no

J. Scott Coatsworth formatting. It’s… weird.

Angel Martinez Scott’s been having to deal with it with several cooks in the kitchen 😉

Jaime Camille Oooh yeah, that does make sense. It can get chaotic fast. And I’ve never had to properly format things in it, it’s just scripts for our own use

Margot Jane Ohh, that makes sense. Half the time we live together, so we’re already talking about everything in person, then just writing it out in Drive.

J. Scott Coatsworth How did you meet? How did the whole collaboration begin?

Jaime Camille There are complicated dynamics there- right now at this point in the comic no one is dating- but there are exes, and people who’ve slept together, and people who might do so in the future

Margot Jane They’re pretty organic/fluid in their dynamic

Margot Jane And I’ve found what I really like is the weird UST between characters, and lead-up- once you have them dating/paired off “officially”, you kind of lose that fun a bit…Not that it’ll never happen in Kindred Skies, but still.

Wendy Rathbone I just subscribed. It was super easy. I want to subscribe to more stuff like this.

Jaime Camille Thanks for subscribing! And we can try and rec some other webcomics for you, Are you looking for stuff in the same genre of fantasy-adventure, or BL or….? We know lots of people in webcomics, we can try and point you in the right direction 😀

Jaime Camille and Margot Jane – Kindred Skies

KINDRED SKIES is about a group of dumb boys doing dumb things (but for money!)

Set in a desert wasteland where being a mercenary is often just a good honest living, Rofaryn and his men struggle to make their way in a world of goddesses and sorcerers, drugrunners and warlords.

Co-creator, writer, site runner/mangler, colorist- sure, Margot does stuff. crazy lame. Works in the majestic hollywood dream machine. Cosplay yes. Writing? Sure! Also does photography. loves photography. would eat photography if it came in flavors other than developer.

Jaime Camille

Co-creator and artist. Jaime spends way too many hours working behind a desk…But she works in animation, so she can’t complain too much.

Jaime graduated recently with a BFA in 3D modeling (because making a living as an illustration major is a scary prospect! As CG generalist, though, her interest in drawing stuck around. So when she’s home, she draws this silly thing instead. Hugs, chocolate chip cookies, and talking about books are pretty much her friendship cheat code.